“American Homo: Community and Perversity: by Jeffrey Escoffier— How Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual people Have Challenged and Changed Society

Escoffier,
Jeffrey. “American Homo: Community and Perversity”, Verso, 2018.
How Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual people Have Challenged and Changed Society
Amos Lassen
In ”American
Homo”, Jeffrey Escoffier looks at LGBT movements across American political
life, where they have had to deal with the historical tension between the
homoeroticism and outbreaks of homophobia. He explores how “every new success brings
about a new disciplinary and normalizing form of domination; only the active
exercise of democratic rights and participation in radical coalitions allows
LGBT people to sustain the benefits of community and the freedom of sexual
perversity.”
This
is an exploration of sexual revolution as a process instead of singular events
as well as a look at the central and formative role of LGBT struggles within
that process. LGBT agency and grass-roots knowledge are necessary in order to
create the conditions for radical
change. We see the deconstructionist
tradition of Foucault and Marcuse in this collection of essays and articles
that span 15 years in the author’s
attempt to ‘recode’ the sociopolitical identity of gays and lesbians in
contemporary American life. The book
covers such topics as sexual revolution and the politics of gay identity, the
political economy of the closet, and the limits of multiculturalism, Escoffier
traces the political vitality of gays and lesbians and “how that vitality
challenges the traditional heterosexist political and economic hegemony.” In
order to overcome the antidemocratic agenda of the far Right, gays and lesbians
will have to unite with other social movements.

In the early chapters, we look at the rise of the gay movement and the
increasing importance of visible sexuality in gay people’s lives. He go from
there to the importance of how identity manifests itself in community and
politics. The tensions that exist between a professionalized homosexual politic
(particularly in the academy) and the more independent, community-based models
of grass-roots groups such as ACT UP and Queer Nation are important to
understanding how we got to where we are.